The Story of the Bottle

A product that fuels humanity. Resources from many places beneath the earth and deep in the seas. An object that provides millions of people with sustenance. An innovation that helps give those millions one of the most important requirements for life. The stainless steel water bottle is a spectacular innovation of the modern era.

This product is made from many different raw materials. These include impure nickel minerals, chromite, limestone, and petroleum which is also known as crude oil. These resources are mainly found deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The minerals and limestone are extracted by miners. To supervise this extraction, mining engineers are required to help safely manage the miners. They use their knowledge to obtain required resources. The petroleum is piped to the surface, but to do so it is needed to know where it is, which requires the help of petroleum engineers, who find the oil necessary to make the bottles, as well as designing ways to extract it from its residing place beneath the surface.

These raw materials are just the beginning of a bottle’s story. Next, the minerals must be refined into pure metals. Ludwig Mond created the Mond process, sometimes referred to as the carbonyl process, to refine the nickel minerals into pure nickel. This works through a process of mixing and heating the minerals with carbon monoxide and a mixture called syngas, which is made through a process called steam reforming, which is applied to hydrocarbons from the petroleum, to make the syngas used in the Mond process. This accomplishment of chemical engineering, in which engineers create processes which rely on chemistry, is crucial to the creation of stainless steel water bottles. This is because nickel is used to make SUS304, a form of stainless steel. You also need chromium and iron to make this alloy. A convenient way to get both of them is ferrochromium, an alloy of iron and chromium with chemical formula FeCr. To make the ferrochromium, you will need lime. Lime is made by burning limestone, and mixing it in water. Ferrochromium is produced by mixing chromite and lime in an electric arc furnace. This feat of electrical engineering was first patented by Sir Carl Wilhelm Siemens, whose name was anglicized into Sir Charles William Siemens, and it is vital for the creation of stainless steel water bottles, because it is also used to alloy the ferrochromium and nickel into the SUS304 stainless steel alloy. These are then turned into seamless stainless steel pipes. The first stainless steel seamless pipes were engineered by the Mannesman brothers. This invention which was an accomplishment of product engineering, or manufacturing engineering, which involves the designing of a product and how to manufacture it, is the product that is turned into a water bottle by companies that manufacture them.

After the creation of pipes at different companies, they are shipped, likely by boat or plane, to water bottle manufacturers, and are then cut into smaller pipes the size of two bottles. These long pipes are subjected to the power of a hydroforming machine. This process and machine was created and patented by Fred Leuthesser Jr. This device is an achievement of process engineering, in which processes are designed and optimized to be the most efficient. The ends of the pipe are formed into a bottle. Next the pipe is split into two halves, each one will eventually become a bottle. Then the bottle is shaped into a form that follows all of the requirements for stainless steel water bottles. Next, the upper part of the bottle is squeezed into a neck. Then the ridges which the cap will turn on are threaded. The bottle is cleaned and inspected. The outer bottle is ready.

Now, it is time for the inner bottle. While the above steps are performed, the same steps are repeated, parallel to each other. The only difference being the lack of the threading step, since the outer bottle is what the cap will turn on. Then the two bottles are pressed at the top to match the mouths. Next, a stainless steel disk is pressed onto the bottom, acting as the base of the bottle. The two mouths and the two bottoms are welded together. The now almost completed bottle goes through a series of leak and temperature tests. Then it is polished through the chemical process of electropolishing, another innovation of chemical engineering. This process removes a thin layer from the surface of the bottle, leaving a shiny and smooth surface. The bottle is basically complete. Only one crucial component remains.

This fundamental component is the bottle cap, which is normally made out of plastic. Plastic is made by refining the petroleum found earlier into ethane and propane, now our second use of this resource. These hydrocarbons are then heated and subjected to a process called cracking. Cracking was first developed by William Merriam Button, and it is another wonderful feat of chemical engineering. This method creates ethylene and propylene, which are formed into polymers of plastic. These are then melted and formed into the shape of a bottle cap in an injection molding machine. This machine is a triumph of mechanical engineering, it was created by John Wesley Hyatt, and is useful for many purposes, water bottles included. The cap can now be attached to the bottle created in previous steps, finishing the production of the water bottle. What has just been told to you is the story of the creation of a stainless steel water bottle, which I personally use for drinking and storing dihydrogen monoxide, which is its intended use.

Hopefully, I will never need to dispose of this item and, even if I did, it would probably be melted into something else useful. This fact makes the water bottle beneficial for the environment, as one of the main causes of ocean pollution is plastic water bottles. This story has been the completed life cycle of the astonishing, stainless steel water bottle.